Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s lead is wilting against leading Republican presidential candidates in three critical swing states, Colorado, Iowa and Virginia, and she finds herself in a close race with U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in each state, according to a Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll released today. In head-to-head matchups, every Republican candidate effectively ties her in Colorado and almost all Republicans effectively tie her in Iowa.

Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee on Thursday announced he will launch a presidential exploratory committee, a surprising move for the Democratic nomination by a veteran public servant who was not previously considered a potential contender… And he’s already indicated that hitting Hillary Clinton on her vote for the Iraq War — which he opposed — will be central to his rationale for running, introducing a foreign policy foil to Clinton’s cast of potential rivals.

Lincoln Chafee would be a joy to run against in a general election: he’s a Republican turned independent turned Democrat turned quitter, and he made enemies doing it, and every step of the way. But he also wouldn’t get the nomination, for largely those reasons. Chafee’s presence here is probably mostly a reaction to the Democratic Establishment’s increasingly shrill insistence that there be only one candidate for consideration. One! It’s Hillary! They’re all Ready For Hillary! …apparently, ‘they’ are not*.

Big caveat to all of this: all of this is essentially meaningless, in terms of the general election. The numbers this far out – and the candidates who are declaring – will tell us almost nothing about who will win in November of 2016. But as a measure of how happy the Democrats are with their slate… well, we’re getting us some good data on that. With ‘good’ being defined by me and not the Democrats, of course.